RECONNECTING TO THE WISDOM OF THE LAND

by Cordula Frei

Podcast: In dialogue with Angell Deer

Reconnecting with the Wisdom of the Land: A Call to Remember

By Cordula Frei

In an age where efficiency is worshipped and speed is mistaken for progress, many of us—especially women—are quietly, deeply tired. Not just from the daily demands of modern life, but from something more ancient, more insidious: a slow estrangement from our source, our wild essence, and the earth herself.

This theme surfaced with striking clarity in a recent conversation I had with Angell Deer, mystic, medicine man, and founder of The Sanctuary, a shamanic healing center nestled in the wilds of Callicoon, NY. Angell, who walks a path woven from Andean cosmology and Norse shamanism, speaks of healing as a return—not to something new, but to something forgotten. Something ancient. His work, especially with leaders who carry the weight of outward success but inward emptiness, reveals a universal ache: the longing to reconnect with the land, with self, and with soul.

He reminded me of a truth I have carried for years but sometimes lose in the noise: that true leadership begins within, and that healing the world’s crises starts by mending the internal rifts we have with our own nature. The forest does not rush. The river does not optimize its flow. And yet everything belongs, everything thrives, everything transforms.

Angell’s vision is not just personal; it is collective. At The Sanctuary, land becomes teacher, silence becomes guide, and each breath an invocation of what we are here to remember. It is no coincidence that so many who arrive there are exhausted not only by their calendars but by a kind of spiritual jetlag—a disconnection from the rhythms of the earth and the rituals that once shaped our lives.

Many women and men today are living in a kind of flight. Outwardly successful, inwardly fragmented. They flee—not only from expectations, roles, and overwhelm—but from themselves. Inside them resides an ancient knowing, a memory so deep that it often eludes language. A sense of what it once meant to feel safe—held in a web of women, grounded in community, attuned to the rhythms of the Earth.

That safety is missing today. And the nervous system searches for it relentlessly. Somewhere deep in the reptilian brain, an alarm sounds—one that no weekend wellness retreat can fully silence. Because the root is missing.

Modern women are rarely fully arrived. Often, they are in a constant state of running—between roles, emotions, expectations, and memories. This flight is not conscious. It is a protection strategy embedded in the nervous system, born in a time when safety meant belonging—or surviving. The body remembers ancient threats: exclusion, loneliness, loss of control. But it also remembers the days of the firekeepers, the elders, the wild priestesses.

Because yes—women were leaders. Keepers of culture, soul, and story. Men guarded the periphery, but women held the hearth—the children, the medicine, the lore. They understood birth, death, and transformation. And this knowledge is not lost. It is only buried.

Today, the modern woman feels a yearning—a visceral, almost unnameable ache for something primordial. A place she has never been, but deeply misses. This is not nostalgia. It is biological, spiritual, ancestral. It is the voice of the inner warrior who no longer wants to defend, but to lead. Not to flee, but to shape.

But where, in this culture, is she allowed to do that?

In a world that prizes linear success over cyclical wisdom, feminine leadership is often misunderstood. Instinct is labeled irrational. Deep perception mistaken for weakness. Yet it is precisely this capacity that the world is starving for: women who lead from their center—not with force, but with presence. Not with control, but with trust.

This inner warrior is not loud. She is clear. She needs spaces to remember her dignity, her intuition, her responsibility—and her pain.

When we stop running from ourselves and start remembering, something old and sacred is reborn in new form. We return to what was never truly gone. We begin to live from a center that does not need to prove itself, only to be true.

Anna — The One Who Keeps the Fire

It was a silent afternoon in January when Anna, a woman of the village, approached me. She looked almost shy and asked,“My feet in the icy water—did you see that? I’ve never forgotten it.”

I smiled. In that moment, I saw how deeply we yearn for such simple, true gestures—lived simplicity, closeness to nature, authenticity that needs no proof. Anna, who has tended gardens, raised children, cared for elders, and visited neighbors quietly, holds an ancient power.

She reminds us: rituals live in everyday acts. Kneading bread, gathering herbs in the mist, listening to one’s thoughts while cooking—these are our rites. They root us, nurture us, and weave us back into the web of life.

In every woman lives a Keeper, in every man a Warrior—not the stereotype of violence, but the archetypal guardians of life. They once stood ready to give everything for the sake of community. The Warrior in men was not fueled by ego but by service to the greater whole; the Keeper in women preserved stories, guided rites, and held the soul of the tribe.

Yet both have been wounded by forgetting. Their languages fell silent, their powers were dismissed, their roles deemed outdated. In their shadows they live on—distorted, unloved, misunderstood.

The male Warrior became performance pressure, competition, hardness. Stripped of ceremonial purpose, he wields weapons of control not out of courage but fear. His wound is the loss of sacred service.

The female Keeper became a functionary—independent but disconnected. Fueling every project, she lost the fire of ritual that once sustained her. Her wound is exhaustion from self-denial.

Each projects their pain onto the other: women see men as absent and cold; men see women as overwhelming and unpredictable. Yet in these projections lies the path to healing: when the Keeper stops proving and begins to remember her wisdom, and the Warrior stops performing and begins to feel.

The deepest healing happens where both meet in truth—beyond gender roles. There, tribal order returns, not as regression but reconnection to what is larger than either.

For many women, pain is the first messenger of disconnection: diffuse symptoms without clear lab values or imaging—fibromyalgia, persistent exhaustion, sleep disturbances, cognitive fog. It emerges after years of overperformance and emotional strain. Society rewards endurance, not honest attention, and the body rebels when compassion is withheld.

Many men harbor a silent wound too: the loss of connection to their own softness and emotional depth. Taught early that their value lies in function, they mask emptiness with work, humor, or vice. Yet beneath the performance lies the original Warrior—waiting for a call not of duty but of truth.

What if we ceased to see pain as enemy and embraced it as guide? What if exhaustion marked not the end of our strength but the birth of a deeper, quieter, healing power?

We are here to remember. To heal. To reweave the sacred fabric of life.

It began softly: a glance into the overgrown garden, a longing to touch something alive again. I pulled on my old rubber boots, took up a hoe—and began to dig.

The earth was hard from winter, heavy with forgetting. But beneath the surface lay soft, dark depth: earthworms. Life.

I dug, and in the garden’s stillness something within me started to loosen. It was not a plan, but my breath that guided me. No pressure, no goal—just a gentle remembering.

I planted lettuce, radishes, nasturtiums. Each morning I watered, and joy blossomed: waiting for the first sprouts, sensing the right moon phase for sowing.

The morning mist, once ignored became a beauty ritual—my skin drinking it in. The cobwebs in the shed’s corners were no longer a disgrace but allies—delicate nets holding stories.

I relearned cooking—not quickly, but sensually: the scent of wild garlic infused in oil, the oven’s warmth, the hushed pop of pea pods.

I was no longer a manager. Yet here I managed life, observed growth, tended the silent becoming. I guarded, nurtured, and drew from the soil.

And my overactive exhausted mind—once in perpetual motion—grew still.

Still and expansive.

For at last it could flow.

If you recognize yourself in this woman—or envision her in your future—take a moment today:

You need no garden. A pot of soil, a bowl of water, your hands will do.

Sit in quiet presence.

Breathe deeply.

Place your hands in the earth—or simply hold them as if cradling it.

Close your eyes.

Imagine you are digging—not outwardly, but within.

What lies hidden beneath your surface?

What wants to be sowed anew?

Which of your gifts are not “productive,” but alive?

Speak aloud:

“I am much more than what i produce.

I am earth.

I am change.

I am creation.”

Then plant something—if only symbolically: a bulb, a seed, a tender shoot.

And you will feel: everything you need is already here.

Because in our cells there lives remembering.

Women have risen—boldly, brilliantly—into careers, claimed the banners of feminism, equal rights, and self-confidence. These strides have been vital, necessary, and hard-won. Yet, in this noble ascent, we must remember the ancient power that lies not in doing more, but in being—in holding sacred space, in tending to the invisible threads that weave a community, a lineage, a living earth.

When a woman, burdened by relentless expectations, forgets to bring the fragrance of the Goddess into her daily rhythm, something essential begins to fade. The deities, once singing softly through her touch, her gaze, her rituals, fall silent. The warmth in her presence, once a sanctuary for others, begins to cool. The land, too, feels the absence—thirsting for the songs that once nourished its spirit.

If the woman forgets to sing to the soil, to honor the moon, to bless the bread and the bodies she serves with love, the world dulls. It loses a kind of magic only she can bring. Because when she sings, the Earth listens. When she remembers, the whole tribe remembers. And through her, life is made sacred again.

- by Cordula Frei